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Activities of Alice KUHNKE related to 2022/2171(INI)

Opinions (1)

OPINION on the EU strategy for sustainable and circular textiles
2023/03/10
Committee: FEMM
Dossiers: 2022/2171(INI)
Documents: PDF(167 KB) DOC(54 KB)
Authors: [{'name': 'Alice KUHNKE', 'mepid': 197395}]

Amendments (18)

Amendment 7 #
Draft opinion
Recital A a (new)
A a. Whereas the Commission in its Gender Equality Strategy 2020-2025 commits to include a gender perspective in all aspects and levels of policy making, internal and external, including addressing needs, challenges and opportunities in specific sectors;
2022/12/14
Committee: FEMM
Amendment 12 #
Draft opinion
Recital A b (new)
A b. whereas women are disproportionately represented in the most vulnerable and marginalised positions in the sector; whereas many of the women making up the garment industry are low wage workers, whereas garment workers on average only receive 1-3% of the final retail price of clothing;
2022/12/14
Committee: FEMM
Amendment 15 #
Draft opinion
Recital A c (new)
A c. whereas many women workers in the garment industry are under the threat of violence and sexual harassment, whereas issues linked to gender-based harassment and violence are often silenced by giant global value chains and intensified by gender power imbalances between a mostly female workforce and predominantly male management structures;
2022/12/14
Committee: FEMM
Amendment 20 #
Draft opinion
Recital A d (new)
A d. whereas the voices of women workers in the garment industry are often unheard; whereas the unequal distribution of power and agency, a lack of representation and limited access to justice have huge significance for the injustices women workers in the garment sector experience;
2022/12/14
Committee: FEMM
Amendment 25 #
Draft opinion
Recital B a (new)
B a. whereas the social, green and feminist agenda are interlinked and share the goal to ensure a fair distribution of resources; whereas a circular economy is necessary for the realisation of the green & just transitions; whereas improving social sustainability therefore cannot be done through a single instrument but requires a holistic approach that looks at design, buying, production, consumption and recycling;
2022/12/14
Committee: FEMM
Amendment 28 #
Draft opinion
Recital B a (new)
B a. whereas many women workers in the garment industry are under the threat of violence and sexual harassment; whereas these issues are often silenced by giant global value chains and intensified by gender power imbalances between a mostly female workforce and predominantly male management structures;
2022/12/14
Committee: FEMM
Amendment 33 #
Draft opinion
Recital B b (new)
B b. whereas women, migrant and informal workers are key to circularity, but are especially vulnerable to negative social impacts; whereas this requires adoption of intersectional perspectives and approaches;
2022/12/14
Committee: FEMM
Amendment 40 #
Draft opinion
Paragraph 1
1. Notes that in addition to its significant negative environmental and climate impacts, the textile industry also has a detrimental social impact; stresses that a disproportionate number of women and marginalised groups carry oute engaged in precarious work, often involuntarilyincluding high levels of part time work, receipt of poverty wages substantially below living wages, forced labour, hazardous working conditions, health damage in connection with chemicals used, and gender-based violence including sexual harassment;
2022/12/14
Committee: FEMM
Amendment 59 #
Draft opinion
Paragraph 2 a (new)
2 a. Calls on the EU to support efforts to prevent gender-based violence in the textile sector by committing to the ratification and implementation of the ILO Convention 190 on Ending Violence and Sexual Harassment in the World of Work;
2022/12/14
Committee: FEMM
Amendment 61 #
Draft opinion
Paragraph 2 b (new)
2 b. Highlights the strong risk of perpetuating existing job quality concerns in circular roles, where marginalised and disenfranchised groups including informal, women and migrant workers are overrepresented; calls therefore for the Commission and Member States to deliberately include positive social outcomes into the transition in all relevant legislation
2022/12/14
Committee: FEMM
Amendment 63 #
Draft opinion
Paragraph 3
3. Calls for employers in the textile sector to facilitate the training and upskilling of low-wage textile sector workers, in particular women and other marginalised groups and including those engaged in the most precarious employment, during working hours;
2022/12/14
Committee: FEMM
Amendment 71 #
Draft opinion
Paragraph 4
4. Welcomes the proposal for an ecodesign regulation covering textiles, the review of the Textile Labelling Regulation3 and the potential introduction of a mandatory disclosure of information; calls for the inclusion of social and labour standards in both the proposed ecodesign regulation and under labelling requirements and to be made available in digital product passports as well as made part of mandatory public procurement; is concerned about the unholistic and limited picture of product impact that the development of criteria to substantiate green claims would create if it does not consider social and gender related impacts, emphasises that such a narrow view of product sustainability is not in line with the EU’s commitments to the Sustainable Development Goals, nor the European Green Deal; _________________ 3 Regulation (EU) No 1007/2011 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 September 2011 on textile fibre names and related labelling and marking of the fibre composition of textile products and repealing Council Directive 73/44/EEC and Directives 96/73/EC and 2008/121/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council. OJ L 272, 18.10.2011, p. 1.
2022/12/14
Committee: FEMM
Amendment 77 #
Draft opinion
Paragraph 4 a (new)
4 a. Highlights that, in order for the digital product passport to be an effective instrument in improving social gender unequal aspects of the textile sector, it should go beyond containing information on due diligence and should also include disclosure of full product information covering the whole value chain, the existence in factories of trade unions and collective bargaining, and information on wage levels and working hours; the information on the digital product passport should be accessible to all parties and based on a common database that other stakeholders can also contribute to;
2022/12/14
Committee: FEMM
Amendment 79 #
Draft opinion
Paragraph 4 b (new)
4 b. Reiterates that compliance with due diligence obligations must be a condition for access to the internal market and that operators should be required to establish and provide evidence, through the exercise of due diligence, that the products that they place on the internal market are in conformity with the environmental and human rights criteria set out in the future due diligence legislation; highlights the prominence of SMEs in the textile sector and calls for their inclusion in the due diligence legislation; emphasises that the negative gender-related impacts cannot be avoided through the proposed due diligence legislation alone;
2022/12/14
Committee: FEMM
Amendment 80 #
Draft opinion
Paragraph 4 c (new)
4 c. highlights in this regard that the due diligence legislation as proposed by the Commission only covers 1% of EU companies and that as the largest garment brands do not dominate the garment industry the way the largest brands do in highly concentrated industries and therefore that regulations only applying to the largest brands will not benefit the majority of the often women garment workers from the protections they are meant to provide; highlights that important conventions, multilateral agreements and human rights instruments relevant to the textile companies’ impacts need to be included in the Annex and that the current list is too limited, particularly to prevent and remedy corporate women’s rights abuses; emphasises that the requirements need to cover the whole value chain with integrated gender analyses in order be an effective instrument for the realisation of workers’ rights in the textile sector;
2022/12/14
Committee: FEMM
Amendment 81 #
Draft opinion
Paragraph 4 d (new)
4 d. Highlights the need to strengthen efforts to incorporate social gender responsive considerations in public procurement in order to support sustainable textile production, use and end-of-life management; calls in this regard for a revision of the 2014 Directive on Public Procurement, as well as on the inclusion of socially responsible, in addition to green, public procurement under the ecodesign regulation;
2022/12/14
Committee: FEMM
Amendment 82 #
Draft opinion
Paragraph 5
5. Calls on the Commission and the Member States to engage with civil society stakeholders, including educational actors and, gender equality organisations, trade unions and grassroots organisations working on the ground in order to develop programmes to increase awareness about the environmental, and climate and human right impacts of the textile and garment industries. and to promote a circular economy including the development of sustainability and respect for human rights throughout the entire textile value chain;
2022/12/14
Committee: FEMM
Amendment 87 #
Draft opinion
Paragraph 5 a (new)
5 a. Highlights that the power asymmetry between buyers and suppliers contributing to unfair trading practices have detrimental effects on labour conditions, wages and overproduction, disproportionately affecting women, especially in non-EU low-wage countries but also in producing countries inside the EU; calls for legislation to combat unfair trading practices in the textile sector, taking inspiration from and learning from the experience of the implementation of Directive 2019/633 on unfair trading practices in the agricultural and food supply chain;
2022/12/14
Committee: FEMM